REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
The CFO of Robinhood Markets, Jason Warnick, said the popular trading platform won’t be a big buyer of digital assets, dashing hopes among some of its users to do so.
“There aren’t compelling reasons strategically for our business to put any meaningful amount of our corporate cash into cryptocurrencies,” he said during The Wall Street Journal’s virtual CFO Network Summit Wednesday.
Robinhood, which went public in July 2021, held approximately $6.16 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the quarter ending September 2021, 340% higher than the $1.40 billion it held at the end of 2020.
Warnick’s comments come after Twitter CFO Ned Segal said in February 2021 the company was considering adding bitcoin to its balance sheet but in November 2021 said bitcoin “doesn’t make sense right now.”
They also contrast with the stance of executives such as MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor and Tesla’s Elon Musk who both have aggressively bought bitcoin using corporate cash.
Warnick also touched on retail investors’ demand for the platform to list more cryptocurrencies, particularly for meme coins like shiba inu that saw a frenzy last year. For now, Robinhood only has seven listed coins — a far cry from the over 100 assets Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US, has listed.
“It’s not lost on us that our customers and others would like to see us add more coins,” Warnick told the Journal. “We’re a highly regulated company in a highly regulated industry, and we think it’s important that we get a bit more clarity from regulators.”
He also denied the platform, which was slammed for its controversial confetti animation whenever a trade was executed, is gamifying investing.
“The headline of gamification is often associated with Robinhood. But the conversation never goes deeper beyond the confetti example, which is now gone,” Warnick told The Journal. “I think the conversation was overblown.”
